Contempt

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Martin Luther (2016)

  And for some final context, we recall that Luther said as vile things about many other groups too. We know that he said extremely foul things about the Muslim Turks, saying for example that their marriages had “all the chastity of a soldier’s relations with a prostitute.” He accused them of being practitioners of “such Latin and sodomitical unchastity that it is not to be mentioned in front of respectable people,” and he called the Koran a “cursed, shameful, desperate” book filled with “dreadful abominations.” And what he said of the papists we already know. If there is the slimmest silver lining in all of this, it might be that we are because of these vilest writings less inclined to make a hagiographic idol out of Luther. We may also take the slight comfort in knowing that a year later he would double back on himself once more and seemingly contradict the gist of what he had written in The Jews and Their Lies. In 1544, he rewrote a hymn titled “O, You Poor Judas, What Did You Do?” and added this verse: T’was our great sins and misdeeds gross Nailed Jesus, God’s true Son, to the cross. Thus you, poor Judas, we dare not blame, Nor the band of Jews; ours is the shame.9 So if people wish to see Luther as any kind of run-of-the-mill anti-Semite, they must be disappointed. He rightly lays the blame for Jesus’s Crucifixion not on the Jews but on every one of us and on himself, as well he should. Before we leave this grimmest of subjects, we must realize that our horror at it comes from the deep irony of it, not just the surface irony that a man so dedicated to worship of the Jewish rabbi Jesus should speak in this way of his ethnic children, but the deeper irony that the man who brought the idea of religious liberty and pluralism into the world within his own lifetime did not recognize these as the natural and inevitable and important outworkings of his own discoveries and teachings. As horrible as all he wrote against the Jews and others can be, perhaps his most execrable fireworks toward the end of his apoplectic life were reserved for the pope, as one might well have expected. In 1545, Luther outdid himself when he wrote Against the Papacy in Rome, from which we pluck this choicest morsel:

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  RomeIn 1513, just as Luther was beginning to teach the Bible at Wittenberg, there ascended to the throne of Peter the former Giovanni di Lorenzo de’ Medici. The papacy itself during this period was the very picture of corruption, so to compare any one of the most egregious six popes of that period—that murderers’ row of troublemakers stretching from Sixtus VI to Leo X—to any pope of more recent years is to compare a gorgon to a milkmaid. These popes and the papacy were at that time as much worldly principalities as anything else, and the spiritual and ecclesiastical element was often merely an addition or overlay to this fundamental reality. So power was the inevitable coin of the papal realm during this time, and as the historian Barbara Tuchman explains in her book The March of Folly, “the process of gaining power employs means that degrade or brutalize the seeker, who wakes to find that power has been possessed at the price of virtue—or moral purpose—lost.”14 The pope who reigned during the time of Luther’s approach to writing his Ninety-five Theses—and up through his subsequent appearance at the Diet of Worms in 1521—was Leo X, whose story is more something like a tale out of Baron Münchhausen than the papal chronicles. Born Giovanni di Lorenzo de’ Medici, the child who would one day rise to become Leo X was set apart for the church at a very early age by his father, although what was meant by that in those days is a far cry from what it would mean to us today. Little Giovanni was tonsured* at the age of seven and through his father’s impertinent wheedling was given an archbishopric just a year later. The idea of an eight-year-old archbishop can and should be curious, but it further reveals how the papacy had become as much like a secular government as imaginable. One might imagine an eight-year-old prince or an eight-year-old duke, so in thinking of the ecclesiastical titles of that day, we must understand we are essentially and practically talking about titles that correspond to aristocratic secular titles. That said, Giovanni was made a cardinal at age thirteen. As some kind of concession to the idea of what a cardinal is supposed to be, this was awarded only in pectore (literally, in the bosom, which is to say, hidden), and three years later, when he was a seasoned and mature sixteen-year-old, it was made flagrante, at which point Giovanni could blaze publicly in his full red-hatted splendor as a teenaged prince of the church.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  One clear example of this willful obstinacy was what Cajetan now did. Luther had argued that the church had never dealt definitively with indulgences, and as proof of this, he pointed out that there was no definitive papal document on the subject. Writing such a document would of course require the church to deal with the theology first, and in dealing with the theology, it would see the problems at hand. Again, this was the principal impetus for his Ninety-five Theses, to bring about a disputation and a reckoning with the theological problems. Furthermore, because no such document existed, how could the church accuse Luther of heresy? What papal document was there to point to that differed from what Luther had said? So Cajetan, eager to shut the mouth of this German heretic as quickly as possible, rather perversely decided to produce such a document himself. He drafted it hastily and on November 9 sent it to Rome. But Cajetan’s document did not in the least deal with Luther’s sincere questions and objections and with the sincerely thorny issues that needed facing. Instead, it high-handedly—and theologically ex nihilo—invoked papal authority. In effect, it was a document that said, “You must now be silent and do as you are told. There will be no questions here. You have heard all you will hear. The great and mighty pope hath spoken.” Of course Luther was not fooled. He heard these attempts to shut him up not as the true voice of God but as a great and mighty hoax, as a machine belching smoke and fire. The smoke and fire came not from the holy mountain of a holy God but were produced by a group of small and fearful men pulling ecclesiastical and legalistic levers from behind red and gold curtains. They did not really have the power they were invoking at all—which is to say, the power and authority of God and truth—and Luther, like a certain small dog, had sensed this and was trying to tell the world, was barking and barking, and would not stop barking, and would in fact eventually pull back the curtain and to the wide world reveal the imperious and worldly chicanery at the black heart of it all.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  So much followed from this single insight. For example, if we appeal to Mary and the other saints before we appeal to Jesus himself, are we not effectively denying the Incarnation itself? Are we not saying that God incarnate never really came into this filthy world to be among us and to love us and suffer for us? For Luther, any appeal to Mary and the saints instead of to Jesus himself became a satanic twisting of the holiest and highest truth in the universe. It was therefore anti-Christ, and he knew that to expose it as such was the most important thing imaginable. In the end, he came to believe that the very devil had taken over the holy church and that somehow he, the lowly monk from Wittenberg, had been entrusted by God with the task of declaring this to the world. So these coals from the very throne room of heaven had been given to Luther in his “cloaca” experience, but what would they light on fire? Where was the fuel for this heavenly fire? It would arrive now, as if on cue, in a literal wagon bearing an indulgence preacher named Johannes Tetzel. The Indulgence ControversyJohannes Tetzel was a Dominican friar. Though he was bald, pleasantly plump, and pushing sixty, his powers of persuasion with a crowd were nonetheless entirely unparalleled. It was for this reason that Pope Leo, increasingly desperate for cash, had bestowed upon Tetzel the title of commissioner of indulgences in Germany—specifically in Magdeburg and Halberstadt. If you needed to raise what was then the equivalent of billions of dollars from the back of a wagon, Tetzel was your man. It is true that he would often say things that were technically not true—which is to say, doctrinally false—but if he could gin up the generosity of the faithful in doing so, the powers that be would look the other way. After all, what was good for business was good for business. The financial needs of Rome were so pressing, so especially urgent, and the powers that be had become so inured to this way of raising funds, or perhaps even so addicted to it, that it would take a very special person to stand athwart this juggernaut and shout, “Halt!” [image file=image_rsrc6KP.jpg] The Dominican priest Johannes Tetzel, whose vigorous preaching of indulgences prompted Luther’s Ninety-five Theses.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  The idea that the pope put himself in the place of Christ—when Luther saw that no one could stand as the true head of the church but Christ—was what caused Luther to begin calling the pope anti-Christ. To stand where only Christ should stand was to be anti-Christ. More and more now, Luther accustomed himself to seeing the papacy in this way, and he became less and less shy about saying so. But this wasn’t the only way that the tone of the larger debate became coarser. After the debate, many Humanists who had been greatly impressed by Luther’s performance and arguments, including Mosselanus, wrote and spoke in his favor, and often without the humility toward the church and the pope that Luther had expressed. And of course those who sided with Eck wrote their own vicious polemics. After Leipzig, the great issues of this debate had overleaped the standard theological fences and now bounded pell-mell through the countryside. Still, it was Luther and Eck who continued to lead the respective charges in their writings. Immediately after the debate, both published their own accounts of what had happened, reiterating their points with ascending shrillness. Because of some attacks on Erasmus and because his style in the debate had been so nakedly aggressive and polemical, Eck’s reputation immediately suffered, while Luther’s grew. For example, because of what he had seen and heard in the Leipzig debate, one of Luther’s future colleagues, Justus Jonas, came over to the Lutheran side. He was ten years Luther’s junior but a brilliant scholar of Greek and Latin who had just been appointed rector of the University of Erfurt. The Leipzig debate changed everything for him, and he would become one of Luther’s very closest friends and allies in the years ahead. But when Erasmus learned that Jonas had gone over to Luther’s side, he was grieved and wrote the following: You will ask me, dearest Jonas, why I spin this long complaint to you when it is already too late. For this reason: Although things have gone farther than they ought to have, we should be watchful in case it is possible to still this dreadful storm. . . . If there are things we do not like in the men who govern in human affairs, my view is that we must leave them to their Lord and Master. If their commands are just, it is reasonable to obey; if unjust, it is a good man’s duty to endure them, lest worst befall. If our generation cannot endure Christ in his fullness, it is something nonetheless to preach him as far as we may.23 Erasmus was a different kind of reformer, quite unlike Luther, and so their lives would take dramatically different paths.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  But Luther was not at all moved by the cardinal’s words. There was much more to these things, and surely the cardinal knew it. The first issue, that Luther had denied that the “treasury of the church” contained the “merits of Christ and the saints,” dealt with the idea that the good works of Christ and the saints not only had been sufficient to earn them their own salvation but had risen far beyond that, so that all of the “extra” merits their many good works had earned were put in the good keeping of the church’s “treasury.” Thus the church—which had been given the keys to that treasury, per Matthew 16:19—could open the vault at any time and give portions of this treasure to whomever it pleased. According to the church, this was its solemn prerogative. So when someone paid for an indulgence, the church was deputized by Christ to trade that payment for a bit of “heavenly treasure.” Someone’s money could be taken by the church in payment to forgive sins and could cancel moral debts. Luther admitted that yes, he had indeed denied this, and then he asked the cardinal to show him where in the Bible this idea could be found. Luther meant not the idea that the church had been given the keys to the Kingdom of Heaven but more specifically the idea that the church was allowed to do as it had been doing with indulgences. What Scripture, he wondered, proved that Christ’s merits were this treasury of merits that the church assumed they were? But at this point Cajetan did not turn to the Bible. Instead, he flourished a papal bull authored in 1343 by Pope Clement VI, hoping this authoritative decree would guide Luther toward a speedy revocation. Cajetan certainly did not expect to wrestle with the details of the antique bull. Here was the bull for all to see. It was canon law; therefore it was official and it was binding. Perhaps now that the questions had been answered, they might proceed to that revocation everyone had been so patiently awaiting. The cardinal was not about to be drawn into a debate, and he pushed Luther with every atom of his authority for a simple answer. “Do you believe this or don’t you?” he asked over and over, and now with increasing volume.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Besides, I’d hate to be a dime-dropper. A what? Lecia said. A snitch, Mother said. A tattletale. But drop the dime Mother did, after Ben, aka Wilbur Fred, took out the trash one day, failing—as she’d told him to do a zillion times—to reline the can with a plastic bag afterward. She later said it had been the straw that broke the camel’s back. The very morning of the unlined garbage can, she called Stooge, who called the feds, who descended on my childhood home with dope-sniffing dogs. What’re you looking for? Mother asked the agent who checked her in to the Holiday Inn, courtesy of the government. Guns, drugs, and money, he said. They found none. Four days after Wilbur Fred vanished back into the penal system from which he’d escaped, Mother got a call from a young woman from Detroit. She was mother to Wilbur Fred’s kids and alleged that he’d left her—hidden in Mother’s house—some much-needed cash. Sure enough, in Mother’s old magazine rack under a batch of New Yorkers, Mother found a paper sack containing ten thousand dollars cash—money Mother decided was hers. The woman threatened to come down there armed with some of Wilbur Fred’s posse, and Mother told her, Come on, I’m locked and loaded for bear down here. Where, Toby finally asks, did she meet this guy? Church, I say. At which everybody laughs.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  In June, Luther decided to reply to Tetzel, but it’s clear that he didn’t take Tetzel seriously. Luther’s vintage sarcasm at last reared its head. Tetzel’s ignorance, as evidenced by what he had written, made him patently unequal to any substantive debate. Luther knew he himself stood on as firm theological ground as existed and cheerily waved away Tetzel’s childish threats of burning and drowning with “fire and water.” Instead, Luther suggested that Tetzel stick “with wine and the fire that smokes from a roasting goose, with which he is better acquainted.”8 Here, we can detect the first coarse notes of a melody that would soon swell to become a virtuoso symphony of invective such as the world had never heard. Luther was thumbing his nose at Tetzel and blowing raspberries too, as though to say, “Excuse me, my good Herr Fatso, but please don’t step away from your fine meal to debate me on these difficult issues! Hold fast to what you value most and keep shoveling food and drink down your gullet!” Luther also accused Tetzel of being a self-serving money-grubber. On the other hand, he taunted, if you are foolish enough to wish to debate me, I am here in Wittenberg, waiting: “And if there is an inquisitor anywhere who thinks he can eat iron and crack rocks, be it known that here he shall have safe conduct, open doors, free room and board.”9 In other words, Frederick the elector will happily provide these things if you like, because you have dared to suggest that he is harboring a heretic in Wittenberg. That same month, Archbishop Albrecht, who was doubtless worried about where this back-and-forth teeth-baring might lead, suggested to the theological faculty at Leipzig University that they make a clarifying statement on the new controversy. But like the Mainz theologians, they demurred, knowing this was growing into a conflagration that could only cause them trouble with Rome. It was far better to lie low and watch the fire from across the street.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  But we do know that at some point the Vatican put the whole matter in the hands of a Dominican named Sylvester Mazzolini. The Dominican order, as we have said, had come into being to protect church doctrine. Mazzolini hailed from the town of Priero, in northwestern Italy, so he took the name Prierias. At the Vatican, Prierias held the title “commissioner of the Sacred Palace,” and it now fell to him to examine the theses and then determine and explain whether they constituted heresy, at which point Luther must appear before the Inquisition in Rome. So at last someone was charged with responding to Luther’s words. And so Prierias did. It was hardly a measured response. Prierias bragged that he had written his stinging answer to the arrogant German monk in only three days! But what had been his findings? For the Wittenberg monk, the title of the work, Dialogue Against the Presumptuous Conclusions of Martin Luther Concerning the Power of the Pope, did not bode well. In the hastily written publication, Prierias did not tunnel to any particular theological depths. For him, the matter was quite simple: As I intend to sift your doctrine thoroughly, my Martin, it is necessary for me to establish a basis of norms and foundations. . . . Third foundation: He who does not accept the doctrine of the Church of Rome and pontiff of Rome, as an infallible rule of faith, from which the Holy Scriptures, too, draw their strength and authority, is a heretic. Fourth foundation: The Church of Rome can make decisions both in word and deed concerning faith and morals. And there is no difference except that words are better suited. In this sense habit acquires the force of law, for the will of a prince expresses itself in deeds which he allows or himself arranges to have done. Consequently: as he who thinks incorrectly concerning the truth of Scriptures is a heretic, so too he who thinks incorrectly concerning the doctrines and deeds of the Church in matters of faith and morals is a heretic. The work had many frothy put-downs, such as “Just as the Devil smells of his pride in all his works, so you smell of your own malevolence” and a description of Luther as “a leper with a brain of brass and a nose of iron.”*15 The conclusion to this peppery opus was a swift kick to the point: “Whoever says that the Church of Rome may not do what it is actually doing in the matter of indulgences is a heretic.”16 There it was. Luther must therefore now travel to Rome and face the Inquisition.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Before he had left Wittenberg for Orlamünde, Karlstadt had only confirmed Luther’s opinion of him as someone who had gone too far, who had to some extent thrown his lot in with Müntzer and the Zwickau prophets, all of whom pushed a kind of forced egalitarianism that smacked more of pure social ferment and anger at the nobles than of the Gospel of Christ. Karlstadt—who, although no longer allowed to preach, was still lecturing at the university—had overseen a doctoral ceremony and in the midst of it declared that such ceremonies were inherently godless because Jesus had forbidden his disciples to call anyone “master.” We don’t know whether Luther rolled his eyes, or whether anyone did so in those days, but we do know that he was sorely tempted to walk out. Karlstadt and his forced and legalistic interpretations of the Scriptures smelled to Luther like fanaticism, so it is no great wonder he put Karlstadt in the Schwärmer category with the Zwickauers and Müntzer. At Orlamünde, Karlstadt also had free rein to push his dualistic theories about the wickedness of images. He believed that the material world and the world of “creation” must be transcended, and that meant images and statues too. And he twisted the Scriptures themselves, claiming Jesus had said that we as his bride were to present our “naked souls” to the bridegroom. So anything having to do with what he called the “clothing” of the “creation” was strictly verboten. All of this had a vague idea of getting back to the soil and nature, as though “nakedness” were more natural than clothing. But Luther would have seen this as a leap back to Eden without the cross, as though we could go back through our own efforts and forget that blood had ever been shed for our sins. And so it was heresy and foolishness both. Luther also sniffed Old Testament legalism in some of what Karlstadt was brewing and quipped that they would soon be introducing circumcision. But it was all a harebrained hodgepodge, because added to these things was a reliance on “hearing from God” via inner voices and revelation that was unmoored from the Scriptures and therefore wide open to excess and theological confusion. Luther had never put much truck in “hearing God” in the way of the mystics, but it was less this—which could in some circumstances be respectable and biblically grounded—than the idea that Karlstadt and the other Schwärmer were using this mainly as an excuse to slip free from the strictures of Scripture or, as they might have seen it, to be “free” and “natural.”

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  HumanismIt was as a philosophy student at Erfurt that Luther first encountered the fashionable new intellectual movement called Humanism* and there met a number of professors and students devoted to it. Two of these professors were Bartholomaeus Arnoldi Usingen and Jodokus Trutfetter, with whom he would stay in touch for many years. And one of the students at Erfurt during this time was a young man named Georg Burkhardt, a tanner’s son from the Bavarian village of Spalt. This Georg Burkhardt would in a few years do what most Humanists of the time did and take a Latin or Greek name. Burkhardt chose to Latinize the name of his village and was thenceforth known as Spalatinus, although the German form of this was Spalatin, and it was as Spalatin that he was known to Luther. He would one day become an extraordinarily close friend to Luther and as important a player in this story as anyone. But at this early point, the two were simply acquaintances. The school of thought that had previously and for centuries held sway in medieval Europe was known as Scholasticism. Its principal figures were Duns Scotus, William of Ockham—of eponymous “razor” fame—and Thomas Aquinas. Today most regard Scholasticism as a fussy, over-formalized way of instruction that was fatally removed from practical life issues. The idea of ivory-tower academics wrangling and perspiring over outré philosophical riddles—as the marauding Turks lay siege to Constantinople and Christendom—is memorably summed up in the classic question “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” This was no hyperbolic joke but something that the Scholastics earnestly debated. Also, instead of reading the Bible itself, students during the Scholastic period read Peter Lombard’s Sentences, which were his commentaries on portions of Scripture—or even read Duns Scotus’s gloss on Lombard’s Sentences. Thus students were enticed to gambol on the loose tiles of the roof, unable to see or know anything of the house and foundation below them.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Do you know what the Devil thinks when he sees men use violence to propagate the gospel? He sits with folded arms behind the fire of hell, and says with malignant looks and frightful grin: “Ah, how wise these madmen are to play my game! Let them go on; I shall reap the benefit. I delight in it.” But when he sees the Word running and contending alone on the battle-field, then he shudders and shakes for fear.15 Luther more than did his part in preaching the Gospel in these years. In 1522, he preached 117 Sunday sermons in Wittenberg. The next year he preached 137 sermons there. And he preached many sermons on the road too. The Prophets ReturnLuther and company had not heard the last of the gung ho Zwickau prophets, whom Luther eventually lumped in with other radicals under the derisive term Schwärmer (fanatics). Sometime in early January, Storch and Drechsel had fled Wittenberg as hastily as they had come and were now traveling throughout Germany to spread their loopy doctrines wherever they might. Storch’s ability to work his hypnotic voodoo on crowds was unparalleled, especially as he wove increasingly spine-tingling tales of what he had seen in the heavenlies. He spoke often of seeing the archangel Gabriel, and even went so far as to claim that Gabriel had told him that he himself would one day sit on Gabriel’s throne, although he failed to explain where Gabriel would then sit. The youngest of the trio, Thomas Stübner—who had been Melanchthon’s student—remained behind with Melanchthon, who kindly put him up in his own home and defended him against a growing number of deeply suspicious Wittenbergers. Stübner stayed with Melanchthon and his wife for some time and did not cease to harry them with increasingly apocalyptic prophecies. At some point, he claimed the Muslim Turks would soon arrive to kill every priest, including the ones who had presumably done the right thing in marrying. He also claimed that in five—or seven—years a violent revolution would come, although those who had remained devout would survive, and there would be no more divisions in Christendom. We can only imagine how the cerebral and sweet Melanchthon dealt with all of this. Things came to a bizarre pass when one day they were all sitting at the table and Stübner—perhaps exhausted from weeks of nonstop prophesying—nodded off. He then awoke quite suddenly, declaring that he was in fact John Chrysostom, the fourth-century archbishop of Constantinople.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  AS THE 1520S rolled to their conclusion, the only reason Luther was still alive and the Reformation had been able to spread as it had was that the emperor had been too busy to enforce the paper tiger known as the Edict of Worms. In fact, since the Diet of Worms in 1521, Charles had not been in Germany at all. He had been busy fighting the French. In 1526, the emperor had been unable to attend the Diet of Speyer, instead asking his younger brother, Archduke Ferdinand of Austria, to preside. But in the five years since Worms, the mostly unmolested Lutherans had increased their strength dramatically. And the emperor’s strength was further compromised by having to battle the Turks on the eastern border of his empire and having to battle Francis I of France on his western. Charles was getting no help in fighting the Turks from Germany, and then, when he finally defeated France in 1525 at the Battle of Pavia, Pope Clement VII—who had succeeded Adrian VI—used his authority to release the French from the harsh peace conditions that Charles had imposed on them. The emperor couldn’t win. As a result of these papal shenanigans, Charles fell out with Clement, which in turn caused Clement to ally himself with Milan, Venice, Florence, and France, an alliance called the Franco-Italian League, or the League of Burgundy. England was to have been a part of this alliance too, but when Henry VIII failed in his petulant attempts to have everyone cross the channel to sign the treaty on his turf, he stormed out of the league in a sable-colored huff.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Thus Georg Wilhelm Hegel (1770–1831) evolved a philosophy which was in some respects strikingly similar to Kabbalah. This was ironic, since he regarded Judaism as an ignoble religion which was responsible for the primitive conception of God that had perpetrated great wrong. The Jewish God in Hegel’s view was a tyrant who required unquestioning submission to an intolerable Law. Jesus had tried to liberate men and women from this base servitude, but Christians had fallen into the same trap as the Jews and promoted the idea of a divine Despot. It was now time to cast this barbaric deity aside and evolve a more enlightened view of the human condition. Hegel’s highly inaccurate view of Judaism, based on the New Testament polemic, was a new type of metaphysical anti-Semitism. Like Kant, Hegel regarded Judaism as an example of everything that was wrong with religion. In The Phenomenology of Mind (1807), he substituted the idea of a Spirit which was the life force of the world for the conventional deity. Yet as in Kabbalah, the Spirit was willing to suffer limitation and exile in order to achieve true spirituality and self-consciousness. As in Kabbalah again, the Spirit was dependent upon the world and upon human beings for its fulfillment. Hegel had thus asserted the old monotheistic insight—characteristic also of Christianity and Islam—that “God” was not separate from mundane reality, an optional extra in a world of his own, but was inextricably bound up with humanity. Like Blake, he expressed this insight dialectically, seeing humanity and Spirit, finite and infinite, as two halves of a single truth which are mutually interdependent and involved in the same process of self-realization. Instead of pacifying a distant deity by observing an alien, unwanted Law, Hegel had in effect declared that the divine was a dimension of our humanity. Indeed, Hegel’s view of the kenosis of the Spirit, which empties itself to become immanent and incarnate in the world, has much in common with the Incarnational theologies that have developed in all three faiths. Hegel was a man of the Enlightenment as well as a Romantic, however, and he therefore valued reason more than the imagination. Again, he unwittingly echoed the insights of the past. Like the Faylasufs, he saw reason and philosophy as superior to religion, which was stuck in representational modes of thought. Like the Faylasufs again, Hegel drew his conclusions about the Absolute from the working of the individual mind, which he described as caught up in a dialectical process which mirrored the whole.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Platonism was one of the most popular philosophies of late antiquity. The new Platonists of the first and second century were not attracted to Plato the ethical and political thinker but to Plato the mystic. His teachings would help the philosopher to realize his true self, by liberating his soul from the prison of the body and enabling him to ascend to the divine world. It was a noble system, which used cosmology as an image of continuity and harmony. The One existed in serene contemplation of itself beyond the ravages of time and change at the pinnacle of the great chain of being. All existence derived from the One as a necessary consequence of its pure being: the eternal forms had emanated from the One and had in their turn animated the sun, stars and moon, each in their respective sphere. Finally the gods, who were now seen as the angelic ministers of the One, transmitted the divine influence to the sublunary world of men. The Platonist needed no barbaric tales of a deity who suddenly decided to create the world or who ignored the established hierarchy to communicate directly with a small group of human beings. He needed no grotesque salvation by means of a crucified Messiah. Since he was akin to the God who had given life to all things, a philosopher could ascend to the divine world by means of his own efforts in a rational, ordered way. How could the Christians explain their faith to the pagan world? It seemed to fall between two stools, appearing to be neither a religion, in the Roman sense, nor a philosophy. Moreover, Christians would have found it hard to list their “beliefs” and may not have been conscious of evolving a distinctive system of thought. In this they resembled their pagan neighbors. Their religion had no coherent “theology” but could more accurately be described as a carefully cultivated attitude of commitment. When they recited their “creeds,” they were not assenting to a set of propositions. The word credere , for example, seems to have derived from cor dare: to give one’s heart. When they said “credo!” (or pisteno in Greek), this implied an emotional rather than an intellectual position. Thus Theodore, Bishop of Mopsuestia in Cilicia from 392 to 428, explained to his converts: When you say “I engage myself” ( pisteuo ) before God, you show that you will remain steadfastly with him, that you will never separate yourself from him and that you will think it higher than anything else to be and to live with him and to conduct yourself in a way that is in harmony with his commandments.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Nonetheless, as far as Karlstadt would push things in the wrong direction, it would all show itself to be almost as nothing when compared to the excesses of Thomas Müntzer. For example, that July Müntzer preached a sermon in front of Duke John. It was essentially a threat disguised as a sermon. Either the princes would join in with the Allstedt reforms, or God would smite them. Müntzer was not one to mince words: What a pretty spectacle we have before us now—all the eels and snakes coupling together immorally in one great heap. The priests and all the evil clerics are the snakes . . . and the secular lords and rulers are the eels. . . . My revered rulers of Saxony . . . seek without delay the righteousness of God and take up the cause of the gospel boldly.2 In other words, slaughter with your swords those who disagree with me, or you yourselves will be slaughtered. Müntzer is one of those cases in history when a madman rises to power and draws others into his madness, resulting in an unrelenting bloodbath. Müntzer, like all utopianists, was divorced from reality and wished to be so divorced, thinking the reality of this world as something to be fled as soon as possible. All political and religious reform movements are tempted in the direction of cultishness and violence, and at the time of Luther, Müntzer was the one who led this charge over the cliff. Throughout history and in the last decades particularly, many have rejected religion precisely because of this sort of pharisaical judgmentalism, harsh legalism, and in the end cruelty and violence that have been manifested in various groups. But just as in Luther’s time, these things have manifested on both ends of the theological spectrum. In Luther’s day, there was on one side the ultra-traditionalist medieval papacy that would ultimately use violence to protect its power and on the other side the radical “left” of such as Thomas Müntzer and his disciples whose intolerance would bring about violence in another way. Luther rightly saw that freedom and truth and love cannot be separated. They partake of each other, and whenever they are divided from each other, the devil gains a foothold and violence enters. On the one hand, he understood that the pope and the church had combined with the emperor to squelch true freedom, to repress honest inquiry, and to do so with deadly force. They were so invested in preserving the status quo that any who persisted in disagreeing with them would be cruelly persecuted and perhaps burned alive. Luther had been crusading against this since the day he posted his theses on the doors of the Castle Church, and this side of things had so merged church and state that these twin powers were essentially a single dreadful authority, one that would not brook dissent.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Müntzer also made it clear that Luther must be one of those slaughtered. He called him “Brother Fattened-Hog”—and Melanchthon “Brother Soft-Life”10—and derided Luther for his love of pleasure and for living only “to devour juicy morsels at court.”11 Then Müntzer demanded an “international” hearing for his ideas. To those in power—which was to say, to those listening to him—Müntzer threatened unleashing the peasant hordes. Either the nobles before him would use their swords for God’s purposes—as he saw them—or God’s “people” would take things into their own hands. All must either accept his gospel or confess themselves heathen and die. There is nothing quite like religious madness, and that it is a foretaste of hell can hardly be debated. Müntzer’s vision was a fever dream from the mind of Satan, that same fever dream as bubbles from the minds of numerous like figures through history unto our own day, for whom the devil is God and life is death, for whom grace is weakness and cruelty is justice. This is the hellish apotheosis of self, in which all “others” are either enslaved or killed. And so Müntzer—having delivered himself of this cheery homily to the territorial lords—awaited their decision. Won’t you help me smash the sky and ascend with me into the empyrean? Or will you consign yourselves to be slaughtered and go to hell? How Dukes John and John Frederick had squirmed during this message we can only guess, nor will we ever know whether when it was over they shook Müntzer’s hand on the way out and told him they had enjoyed his sermon. We do know that Müntzer soon after had this “sermon”—along with an added bonus section on dreams—printed. Then, on July 17, Müntzer contacted Karlstadt in Orlamünde, inviting him to join his “league of the elect” and inviting him to prevail upon fifteen villages to join them. To his eternal credit, Karlstadt immediately saw that Müntzer was about to do what everyone had feared, to lead an armed “people’s” revolt against the nobles, and so he promptly tore up the letter. But then he rode his horse to a friend’s home and reconstituted the letter to show his friend what Müntzer was proposing, so he would have proof. Karlstadt had never promoted violence, and two days later he wrote to Müntzer, firmly refusing to participate and counseling him to cease and desist from his martial plans. To be sure, they had some important things in common, but leading hordes of peasants to slaughter nonbelievers—and forcibly drag the End of All Things from the distant future into the present—was not one of them.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Luther also almost violently takes issue with Erasmus’s contention that one’s stance on free will is not important. For Luther, there is no doctrine more important, because for him this was the doctrine that determined how one read all the rest of the Bible. And if this one thing is properly understood, then we can sweep away all of the contrary suggestions in the Old Testament Scriptures that Erasmus cited. To say the question of free will is open to various interpretations is no different to Luther from saying the question of the bodily resurrection and the Incarnation are open to differing interpretations. Not only are they not open to different interpretations, but how we stand on these supremely vital issues determines all else. Thus Luther had worked hard to establish the clarity of this single doctrine beyond all doubt. For him, it is a treasure for emperor and peasant alike, for Kaiser and Karsthans. It is not a theological side issue; on the contrary, it is the one thing everyone can and must understand: without Jesus to save us utterly, we are utterly lost. With Jesus, we are saved. For Luther, all the flailing and the winnowing of his exegeses had produced these vital kernels that were meant to nourish mankind unto eternal life, and whatever contrary arguments Erasmus had put forth must be blown away like chaff. The contrasting stances of Luther and Erasmus are fascinating. That their simmering feud finally boiled over in Luther’s greatest work ended their communication, but not their private feuding. And for all his efforts to distance himself from Luther, the one final grunting shove that was De libero arbitrio still did not sufficiently distance him in the eyes of his most Roman critics, who forever saw him as suspiciously pro-Lutheran. For them, Erasmus’s important work was nonetheless too little, too late. And in 1559, when Pope Paul IV published the Vatican’s first Index of Prohibited Books, one certainly expected to find Martin Luther’s books there, and did, but if one looked closely, one would have seen Desiderius Erasmus’s were there too.

• From A History of God (1993)

  In 1920, Britain and France carved up the Middle East between them into protectorates and mandates. This colonial project only made a more silent process of Westernization official, since Europeans had been establishing a cultural and economic hegemony during the nineteenth century in the name of modernization. Technicalized Europe had become the leading power and was taking over the world. Trading posts and consular missions had been established in Turkey and the Middle East which had undermined the traditional structure of these societies long before there was actual Western rule. This was an entirely new kind of colonization. When the Moghuls had conquered India, the Hindu population had absorbed many Muslim elements into its own culture, but eventually the indigenous culture had made a comeback. The new colonial order transformed the lives of the subject people permanently, establishing a polity of dependence. It was impossible for the colonized lands to catch up. Old institutions had been fatally undermined, and Muslim society was itself divided between those who had become “Westernized” and the “others.” Some Muslims came to accept the European assessment of them as “Orientals,” lumped indiscriminately with Hindus and Chinese. Some looked down on their more traditional countrymen. In Iran, Shah Nasiruddin (1848–96) insisted that he despised his subjects. What had been a living civilization with its own identity and integrity was gradually being transformed into a bloc of dependent states that were inadequate copies of an alien world. Innovation had been the essence of the modernizing process in Europe and the United States: it could not be achieved by imitation. Today anthropologists who study modernized countries or cities in the Arab world such as Cairo point out that the architecture and plan of the city reflects domination rather than progress. 23 On their side Europeans had come to believe that their culture was not only superior at the present time but had always been in the van of progress. They often displayed a superb ignorance of world history. Indians, Egyptians and Syrians had to be Westernized for their own good. The colonial attitude was expressed by Evelyn Baring, Lord Cromer, consul general in Egypt from 1883 to 1007: Sir Alfred Lyall once said to me: “Accuracy is abhorrent to the Oriental mind. Every Anglo-Indian should always remember that maxim.” Want of accuracy, which easily degenerates into untruthfulness, is in fact the main characteristic of the Oriental mind. The European is a close reasoner; his statements of fact are devoid of ambiguity; he is a natural logician, albeit he may not have studied logic; he is by nature sceptical and requires proof before he can accept the truth of any proposition; his trained intelligence works like a piece of mechanism. The mind of the Oriental, on the other hand, like his picturesque streets, is eminently wanting in symmetry. His reasoning is of the most slipshod description.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  And unlike the insistence on the sinfulness of human works, or the attack on indulgences, this was not a theological argument but 142 MARTIN LUTHER a simple demand for practical reform that could be taken up by ordi- nary people and would lead to far-reaching changes in every parish. Although Luther was careful to concede that those who were given only the bread still received the whole sacrament, the genie could not be put back in the bottle.®° It was the call for Communion in both kinds that popularised the early Reformation as parish after parish demanded to be given the wine as well as the bread. It was also a frontal attack on the status of the clergy as a separate, priestly estate, who therefore merited receiving the whole sacrament and not just the bread. It would only be a matter of time before Luther launched his attack on the nature of the priesthood itself. His criticisms of indulgences had attacked papal authority and the Church hierarchy; now, he was questioning something basic to every parishioner’s experience. Not only that, but he went on to attack brotherhoods, the most important of lay religious organisations, which underpinned the whole system of indulgences with the practice of Christians praying for each other to ensure salvation. These brotherhoods, Luther wrote, were nothing more than excuses for ‘gluttony, drunkenness, useless squan- dering of money, howling, yelling, chattering, dancing, and wasting of time . . . If a sow were made the patron saint of such a brother- hood she would not consent.’* Luther was beginning to develop a distinctive German prose style — vivid, energetic, bursting with repeated verbs, and as earthy as Bruegel’s pictures. There was a growing market for such writing. In the months after the Leipzig Debate, printing suddenly exploded. Between 1518 and 1525, publications by Luther in German exceeded those of the seven- teen next most prolific authors put together. Indeed, Luther alone was responsible for 20 per cent of all the works published in German presses between 1500 and 1530.* As a result of his efforts, printing became one of Wittenberg’s new industries, and it would eclipse Leipzig altogether: when Duke Georg decided against the Reforma- tion, and banned the printing of works by Luther, numbers of titles published there annually plummeted from an average of 140 to forty- three, to the consternation of Leipzig’s printers.